Saturday, January 4, 2014

The Hobbit 2


I saw The Hobbit, Desolation of Smaug.  I liked it better than the last Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey, and although it kept my interest, I was a little bored.  Peter Jackson did an outstanding job, especially in his choice of filming and did keep close to the story, but added too much to make three films when one  or two would have  sufficed.  For example, adding the story line of Legolas the elf, played by Orlando Bloom, who was not in the Hobbit, was somewhat ok but then creating a new character , Tauriel, so that he could have a love interest and then have the love spurned when Tauriel falls for a dwarf, is a bit much.  The scenes with Smaoug were also a bit embellished, but done well and cool to watch.  At times I was almost routing for the dragon...too cool. With all of this said, I look forward to the third Hobbit, but know this trilogy can never compare to the Lord of the Rings, and I am pretty sure it is not supposed to.
 

1 comment:

  1. I would completely agree that Desolation of Smaug was better than An Unexpected Journey. I agree with most of what you said, actually. It was fine for Peter Jackson to bring back Orlando Bloom as Legolas, but to create a new female warrior (in a society where women were definitely not warriors) that fell in love with a dwarf is about as anti-Tolkien as it gets. The spiders were a bit too Guillermo del Toro for my tastes, shall we say - not enough Peter Jackson in that scene. And as for Smaug...well, the dragon was amazing. The use of motion-capture on Benedict Cumberbatch's face gave a whole new level of depth to the character. I say character, because that's what Smaug was - not some computer-generated plot element, but an honest-to-goodness character. The thing is, I'm not sure how Peter Jackson is going to turn the last fifty pages of The Hobbit into another three-hour movie.

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